By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The poem rejects the lie of unprecedented crisis by returning to knife fights, race, and the old knowledge that life has always been trouble.
The page's title makes the argument feel terminal: disaster is not proposed, it is already certain. The poem refuses the comfort that madness is new, insisting that violence and trouble were already part of what people grew up with.
'The End' speaks as 'We': 'Always we are further / than nature', 'We do not suggest deaster / We are sure of it', and 'life / is a bunch of troubble / And it has always beem / that way'. It admits 'We lie / We say this madness is new' when 'knife fights / With whites / Should be something / we gtew up with'.
Very short lines and a flat collective voice give the poem the sound of a creed or confession. Its argument is against the idea that present violence is new, and the title reads less as apocalypse than as the end of that pretense.